Life-Like Characters: Tools, Affective Functions, and Applications

473 Pages·2004·13.05 MB·English

by  Helmut Prendinger

Cognitive Technologies
Managing Editors: D.M. Gabbay J. Siekmann
Editorial Board: A. Bundy J.G. Carbonell
M. Pinkal H. Uszkoreit M. Veloso W. Wahlster
M. J. Wooldridge
Advisory Board:
Luigia Carlucci Aiello John Lloyd
Franz Baader Alan Mackworth
Wolfgang Bibel Mark Maybury
Leonard Bole Tom Mitchell
Craig Boutilier Johanna D. Moore
Ron Brachman Stephen H. Muggleton
Bruce G. Buchanan Bernhard Nebel
Luis Farinas del Cerro Sharon Oviatt
Anthony Cohn Luis Pereira
Koichi Furukawa LuRuqian
Georg Gottlob Stuart Russell
Patrick J. Hayes Erik Sandewall
James A. Hendler Luc Steels
Anthony Jameson Oliviero Stock
Nick Jennings Peter Stone
Aravind K. Joshi Gerhard Strube
HansKamp Katia Sycara
Martin Kay Milind Tambe
Hiroaki Kitano Hidehiko Tanaka
Robert Kowalski Sebastian Thrun
Sarit Kraus Junichi Tsujii
Kurt Van Lehn Andrei Voronkov
Maurizio Lenzerini Toby Walsh
Hector Levesque Bonnie Webber
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg GmbH
Helmut Prendinger
Mitsuru Ishizuka (Eds.)
Life-Like
Characters
Tools, Affective Functions,
and Applications
With 170 Figures and 9 Tables
~Springer
Editors
Helmut Prendinger
Mitsuru Ishizuka
Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering
Graduate School oflnformation Science and Technology
University of Tokyo, 7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan
Managing Editors
Prof. Dov M. Gabbay
Augustus De Morgan Professor of Logic
Department of Computer Science, King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Prof. Dr. Jorg Siekmann
Forschungsbereich Deduktions-und Multiagentensysteme, DFKI
Stuhlsatzenweg 3, Geb. 43,66123 Saarbriicken, Germany
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Life-like characters: tools, affective functions, and applications I Helmut Prendinger, Mitsuru Ishi
zuka (eds.)
p. em. -(Cognitive technologies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-642-05655-0 ISBN 978-3-662-08373-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-08373-4
1. Intelligent agents (Computer software) I. Prendinger, Helmut, 1967- II. Ishizuka, Mitsuru,
1948- III. Series.
QA76.76.158L55 2004 006.3-dc22 2003061492
ACM Computing Classification (1998): H.5.1, 1.2
ISSN 1611-2482
ISBN 978-3-642-05655-0
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Originally published by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York in 2004
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In memory of Jeff Rickel, 1963-2003
Preface
With computers becoming an integral part of virtually all activities in our
daily lives, how can we have effective and efficient, or simply natural and en
joyable, interactions with computers? One of the most promising technologies
is life-like characters - embodied agents apparently living on the screens of
computational devices - that invite us to communicate with them in familiar
ways and even establish socio-emotional relationships.
While embodied agents are becoming increasingly important as virtual
tutors, sales persona, guides, advisors, teammates, and personal representa
tives, the mechanisms and design issues underlying successful character-based
applications are still not well understood and specification and representation
languages for believable character behavior are hard to access and use.
This book is a collection of both academic and corporate endeavors de
scribing powerful and mostly freely available scripting languages and tools for
controlling life-like behavior and systems that demonstrate the potential of
life-like characters in a wide range of application fields. Affective functions,
the key ingredient of life-likeness, are a common topic of all chapters. The
contributions have been carefully chosen and peer reviewed among authors.
The chapter in Part I of this book introduces and motivates the topic, Part
II contains chapters describing languages and tools for character control, and
Part III is dedicated to character systems and applications. In Part IV, two
leading experts in the field address the core themes of this book in the form of
a synopsis. An Internet link to electronic material accompanying the chapters
can be found in the Appendix.
We would like to thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
(JSPS) for their generous support under the Research Grant (1999-2003) for
the Future Program. Our special thanks go to Dr. Paolo Petta of the Aus
trian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence who provided great encour
agement to publish a book on life-like characters. Thanks also to M.Eng. Ju
nichiro Mori for his patient assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
VIII Preface
We are especially grateful to Ms. Ingeborg Mayer and Mr. Alfred Hof
mann of Springer-Verlag, for offering invaluable help and providing optimal
conditions to publish this book.
It is our hope that this book will serve as a valuable guide to the successful
design of life-like character applications for researchers and practitioners alike.
We also hope that the scripting languages discussed in the book will be a
milestone in the development of a standardized language for life-like character
control. Finally, we hope that our book will ignite the interest of the broader
community concerned with making interactions with computers more natural
by using life-like characters as the technology of choice.
Tokyo, Helmut Prendinger
June 2003 Mitsuru Ishizuka
Contents
Part I Introduction
Introducing the Cast for Social Computing: Life-Like
Characters
Helmut Prendinger, Mitsuru Ishizuka............................... 3
Part II Languages and Tools for Life-Like Characters
Representing and Parameterizing Agent Behaviors
Jan Allbeck, Norm Badler.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Toward a Unified Scripting Language: Lessons Learned from
Developing CML and AML
Yasmine Amja, Kaveh Kamyab, Ebrahim Mamdani .................. 39
APML, a Markup Language for Believable Behavior
Generation
Bemrdina De Carolis, Catherine Pelachaud, Isabella Poggi, Mark
Steedman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
STEP: a Scripting Language for Embodied Agents
Zhisheng Huang, Anton Eliens, Gees Visser ......................... 87
gUI: Specifying Complete User Interaction
Andrew Marriott, Simon Beard .................................... 111
A Behavior Language: Joint Action and Behavioral Idioms
Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern ..................................... 135
BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit
Justine Cassell, Hannes Hogni Vilhjalmsson, Timothy Bickmore ....... 163
X Contents
Galatea: Open-Source Software for Developing
Anthropomorphic Spoken Dialog Agents
Shin-ichi Kawamoto, Hiroshi Shimodaira, Tsuneo Nitta, Takuya
Nishimoto, Satoshi Nakamura, Katsunobu Itou, Shigeo Morishima,
Tatsuo Yotsukura, Atsuhiko Kai, Akinobu Lee, Yoichi Yamashita,
Takao Kobayashi, Keiichi Tokuda, Keikichi Hirose, Nobuaki
Minematsu, Atsushi Yamada, Yasuharu Den, Takehito Utsuro, Shigeki
Sagayama ....................................................... 187
MPML and SCREAM: Scripting the Bodies and Minds of
Life-Like Characters
Helmut Prendinger, Santi Saeyor, Mitsuru Ishizuka .................. 213
Part III Systems and Applications
Great Expectations: Prediction in Entertainment Applications
Robert Burke .................................................... 245
Shallow and Inner Forms of Emotional Intelligence in
Advisory Dialog Simulation
Fiorella de Rosis, Berardina De Carolis, Valeria Carofiglio, Sebastiana
Pizzutilo ........................................................ 271
Web Information Integration Using Multiple Character
Agents
Yasuhiko Kitamura ............................................... 295
Expressive Behaviors for Virtual Worlds
Stacy Marsella, Jonathan Gratch, Jeff Rickel ........................ 317
Playing with Agents - Agents in Social and Dramatic Games
Ana Paiva, Rui Prada, Isabel Machado, Carlos Martinho, Marco Vala,
Andre Silva ..................................................... 361
A Review of the Development of Embodied Presentation
Agents and Their Application Fields
Thomas Rist, Elisabeth Andre, Stephan Baldes, Patrick Gebhard,
Martin Klesen, Michael Kipp, Peter Rist, Markus Schmitt ............ 377
Interface Agents That Facilitate Knowledge Interactions
Between Community Members
Yasuyuki Sumi, Kenji Mase ....................................... 405
Animated Agents Capable of Understanding Natural
Language and Performing Actions
Hozumi Tanaka, Takenobu Tokunaga, Yusuke Shinyama .............. 429
Contents XI
Part IV Synopsis
What Makes Characters Seem Life-Like?
Barbara Hayes-Roth .............................................. 447
Some Issues in the Design of Character Scripting and
Specification Languages - a Personal View
Thomas Rist .................................................... 463
Online Material ................................................ 469
Index .......................................................... 471